[HN Gopher] iVentoy
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iVentoy
Author : jaclaz
Score : 171 points
Date : 2023-07-08 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.iventoy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.iventoy.com)
| askiiart wrote:
| Does anyone know of an open-source alternative to this?
|
| I've been looking for a piece of software like this for a while,
| but I'm not gonna run software with full, unrestricted root (and
| internet) access unless the source code is available, or it's at
| least highly trusted.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| ipxe https://ipxe.org/
|
| netboot https://netboot.xyz/ makes use of ipxe underneath
| gh02t wrote:
| https://netboot.xyz/
| vamega wrote:
| I've used this before. Anyone know how is iVentoy different
| from netboot?
| PlutoIsAPlanet wrote:
| iVentoy uses ISOs and NetBoot IIRC does not use ISOs.
| unqueued wrote:
| I actually have something I've been meaning to put on github. I
| wrote it over a decade ago and I need to dockerize it. I only
| made it in Vagrant.
|
| But it can do something iVentoy can not.
|
| https://www.iventoy.com/en/faq.html: The
| computer which run iVentoy must be in the same LAN with them.
| Besides, there must no other DHCP servers in the same LAN.
|
| It can coexist with an existing DHCP server. That means you can
| just start it up on your own network without any modifications,
| and start netbooting machines.
|
| It turns out that multiple DHCP servers can co-exist on the
| same network segment. So I just have a second dhcp server
| solely for a pxe bootstrapper. At the time, at least the
| initial download must be tftp, but I used a stripped down ipxe
| stub that took advantage of the universal undi network drivers,
| and then loaded the rest (usually syslinux) over a fast HTTPS
| connection.
|
| From there, iSCSI was no problem, and I could also use tools
| like plop, memdisk, or grub4dos, as well as Windows 7/8/10 with
| wimboot.
|
| I remember for some distros like Knoppix, we would use an NBI
| driver to just mount the iso directly over the network, which
| could be far simpler and more performant than NFS.
|
| EDIT: To be honest, it is simple enough that it doesn't have to
| use Docker. It is mostly dnsmasq and PHP.
| aaviator42 wrote:
| That seems incredibly cool and I'd love to be able to play
| with and use it! Definitely doesn't sound like something that
| _requires_ docker.
|
| Plus I always have a soft spot for cool tools written in PHP
| :)
| arjvik wrote:
| Shame that iVentoy is not open source, but I understand that
| the author of Ventoy needs a revenue stream for producing such
| useful software.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| I tried netboot.xyz but their IPv6 support in 2023 is still
| broken...
|
| https://github.com/netbootxyz/netboot.xyz/issues/283
|
| Let's try this one.
| quincepie wrote:
| Ventoy is one software that I always recommend to my peers. The
| ability to just throw the isos into a flash drive and have them
| work with no problem and no flashing (except for the initial
| Ventoy flash) makes installing OSs so much easier. The first
| thing i do when i get a flash drive is to install Ventoy on it.
|
| I have used iPXE for a while but it bothered me that the setup is
| a bit difficult especially not being able to load ISOs directly.
| It made me wish that Ventoy was a PXE compatible. Now that
| iVentoy exists, this would make my life so much easier
| trillic wrote:
| Can I run this on my router with a USB flash drive?
| geek_at wrote:
| probably easier to use netboot.xyz (https://netboot.xyz/docs)
| watersb wrote:
| Original Ventoy is a boot utility - a shim that boots ISO image
| files.
|
| You run the included script, it installs onto the USB thumb drive
| you select, and then you can copy ISO images to the USB
| filesystem.
|
| Each ISO automatically becomes a GRUB boot menu option.
|
| This thing is fantastic.
|
| iVentoy is the same idea, over a local network. PXE is a very old
| and pervasive standard for booting a computer by discovering a
| special network file server.
|
| You wouldn't need a thumb drive at all - the client is in the
| BIOS of the motherboard and network interface.
|
| Original idea dates from a time when mass storage - more than a
| few megabytes - was too expensive to install in each workstation,
| and we ran everything, including OS system files, on the file
| server. And we _liked_ it.
| jwiz wrote:
| How is the ISO image presented to the booting machine via the
| network?
|
| Usually it's not too hard to load kernel/initrd from an ISO via
| ipxe/http, but then they need to have a way to see the ISO
| themselves.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > How is the ISO image presented to the booting machine via
| the network?
|
| Probably in two stages.
|
| First a small kernel/initrd is booted with PXE from dhcp+tftp
|
| Then that one has the ability to get the iso image either via
| tftp, or perhaps http or ftp or some other protocol, from the
| machine that served the initial files over tftp
| jwiz wrote:
| Yes, that is how you would do it if you are rolling your
| own boot setup.
|
| But, most ISO images are not set up to work this way, and
| the implication of the iVentoy site is that you can just
| use unmodified ISO images.
|
| That is what I am wondering: How can you use unmodified ISO
| images to boot, as images, over the network? (Or can you?)
|
| All the iPXE forum posts about this idea essentially end
| with "you can't do that without kernel support for reading
| the rest of the ISO.", so if iVentoy has solved that, I
| wanted to know how.
| codetrotter wrote:
| The situation is not all that different from their other
| tool for having multiple ISOs on a usb drive though, is
| it?
|
| You have ISO images that usually you would write onto a
| CD or write to a USB drive with dd. These cannot boot by
| themselves if you just put the ISO file as is onto a
| FAT32 USB drive or similar. But Ventoy has a stage one
| boot thing for USB which you can then use to select an
| ISO file from your USB and somehow boot it.
|
| So iVentoy would work the same way. The stage one is from
| iVentoy, not from the ISO itself. And that stage one does
| something that makes it possible to boot the ISO that it
| retrieved. Similar to how the USB based thing somehow can
| boot the ISO files from the USB.
| jwiz wrote:
| > does something that makes it possible to boot the ISO
|
| The "something" is what I am asking about.
| linsomniac wrote:
| >either via tftp, or perhaps http or tftp
|
| I saw that iVentoy seems to have an NBD server, so it might
| just be mounting the ISO from the server via NBD.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Hadn't heard about NBD before.
|
| > On Linux, network block device (NBD) is a network
| protocol that can be used to forward a block device
| (typically a hard disk or partition) from one machine to
| a second machine.
|
| Nice! That makes a lot of sense!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_block_device
| rtp4me wrote:
| Indeed, it seems iVentoy uses NBD to present block
| storage devices (eg: ISOs) to the DHCP client. I just
| installed iVentoy 1.0.08 in my lab on a Debian 12 VM (via
| VMware 8 server). From there, I created a new VM and
| booted Linux Mint 21.1 via UEFI boot. Linux Mint install
| went well with no noticeable issues.
|
| Overall, first impressions are looking good. Found a few
| bugs that need to get worked out including:
|
| * UEFi boot requires iVentoy to have 2 vCPUs (see forums)
|
| * Restarting the iVentoy script resets the IP Boot config
| (specifically the Subnet Mask and Gateway)
|
| From their release page, iVentoy supports a bunch of
| Linux and Windows install images, and you can even inject
| custom auto-install scripts to the ISO for unattended
| installs. Very cool. Finally, the iVentoy discussion
| forum seems very active, and the developer seems engaged.
|
| I will probably support the developer ($49) because he
| was able to leverage NBD to overcome some iPXE issues I
| struggled with for a long time. I know how much
| time/effort goes into making iPXE booting look seamless.
| Kudos to him/her/them
| jwiz wrote:
| So, it loads some kind of shim that presents as a BIOS
| optical drive, but reads its data via NBD?
|
| Then, say, the linux kernel of the vanilla ISO installer
| sees that shim program as a sort of virtual cdrom?
|
| When you installed Mint, did you happen to notice from
| where the installer thought it was reading the files?
| jaclaz wrote:
| >You wouldn't need a thumb drive at all - the client is in the
| BIOS of the motherboard and network interface.
|
| >Original idea dates from a time when mass storage - more than
| a few megabytes - was too expensive to install in each
| workstation, and we ran everything, including OS system files,
| on the file server.
|
| To be fair, in those times most people had "bare" network cards
| and needed to add an Eprom to it to add the PXE extension.
|
| BIOSes (and integrated network cards) with PXE booting
| capabilities came much later, when local storage (within
| limits) wasn't anymore that much expensive.
|
| But, yes, ... _kids today_ ...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > To be fair, in those times most people had "bare" network
| cards and needed to add an Eprom to it to add the PXE
| extension.
|
| I remember the days of plugging chips into NE2000 clones to
| put in diskless 386's connected to a thinnet network. These
| machines netbooted DOS and the Novell Netware client from a
| 486-based server running Netware 3 using a proprietary, non-
| PXE boot process. Loads of fun.
|
| (I still have a tray of boot ROMs somewhere. I wonder if that
| code has been preserved somewhere or if I should read them
| out...)
| jaclaz wrote:
| From the Author of Ventoy, a new tool for lan/PXE booting.
| alpenbazi wrote:
| if it works as good as ventoy it will be the go-to solution
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| The second I see ISCSI I'm in.
| jwiz wrote:
| ipxe supports iscsi booting.
| getcrunk wrote:
| As another commenter pointed out NetBoot.xyz is open source
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(page generated 2023-07-08 23:00 UTC)